Presbyterian Church (USA) apologizes for silencingmissionaries fired when 200-year tradition ended
Updated: Jun. 30, 2026, 9:01 a.m.
By Greg Garrison | ggarrison@al.com
The Presbyterian Church (USA) apologized Monday for making its missionaries promise not to talk about being fired last year.
The mainline Protestant denomination that has historically been one of the most influential Christian missionary-sending agencies worldwide last year fired missionaries around the world and ended its foreign mission agency.
Before firing missionaries, the denomination sent them legal agreements to sign, promising they would not discuss it under threat of losing pay.
The Rev. Jihyun Oh, the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly who signed the letter to employees who were being fired, apologized Monday during the General Assembly in Milwaukee.
“There was an intention to try to shift past processes where people were surprised on the day of hearing news all of a sudden by informing staff early and asking them to hold information about decisions that were not yet complete,” Oh said.
“For many folks, that felt like they were being silenced, and that it felt like folks could not share the pain and the grief of their journey.”
The office of Presbyterian World Mission closed at the end of March 2025 after the Presbyterian Mission Agency merged with the Office of General Assembly into the Interim Unified Agency.
Those moves essentially ended a 200-year Presbyterian tradition of sending foreign missionaries, more recently called mission “co-workers,” to spread the faith in other countries.
The denomination drastically cut its mission staff from about 60 missionaries, notifying 54 mission “co-workers” on Feb. 4, 2025, they would be terminated.
Oh, who is also executive director of Presbyterian Life & Witness, said that denominational executives “recognize, acknowledge, see, and lament the pain and the grief that this process has caused.”
The General Assembly passed a resolution asking Presbyterian Life & Witness to develop policies prohibiting nondisclosure covenants in employment relationship.
The firing of missionaries was part of a budget-cutting and downsizing effort as the 1-million-member mainline Presbyterian denomination continues to steadily lose members.
When the Presbyterian Church (USA) formed in 1983 as a merger between two Presbyterian denominations in the north and South that separated during the Civil War, it had 3.1 million members. At the end of 2025, it had 1,019,003 members, down from 1,045,848 in 2024 and 1.2 million in 2020.
In 2010, the denomination supported about 200 missionaries worldwide.
The denomination, due to budget cuts and changes in emphasis, now expects Christian work to be done mostly by indigenous leaders around the globe, rather than by U.S. missionaries sent to foreign countries. In fact, many of those countries now consider the United States the mission field and “more and more global partners are sending missionaries to the U.S.,” according to Presbyterian News Service.
Alabama missionaries sent to Africa have been among the most influential worldwide.
Alabama’s regional presbytery is named for famous missionaries, including a Stillman College graduate who was the first Black American missionary sent to Africa.
William Henry Sheppard, who died in 1927, was the one of the first Black Americans sent as a missionary by the Presbyterian Church. He spent two decades in Africa, mostly in the Congo, and publicized the atrocities of King Leopold II of Belgium against the Congolese people.
The Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley, a regional body headquartered in Birmingham, draws its name from Sheppard, his wife, Lucy, and his partner in mission work, Samuel Norvell Lapsley, a white man who was also a long-time Presbyterian missionary in the Congo until his death in 1892.
The Sheppards were graduates of Tuscaloosa Theological Institute, which later became Stillman College.
In 1888, the Presbyterian Foreign Missionary Board told Sheppard they would not send a Black missionary to Africa without a white supervisor. Lapsley volunteered to be his partner.
The denomination has cited its declining membership and reduced financial support and an increase in costs for the cutbacks. Total annual giving toward supporting missionaries peaked in 2000 at about $16 million and declined to about $6 million in 2023.
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